First Light

  “Tell me about your mother,” Simon asks.

  “People said my mother looked a little like Eve Arden, the actress.” Simon flicks his head, annoyed that the name has been explained for him. “She was sharp. Ironic, people said. An ironic woman. She wasn’t that popular in town, except with my father. She made people laugh, but that made them uncomfortable instead of happy. ‘A funny woman.’ That’s what people said about her. Men were supposed to be funny, not women, especially women who laughed at men. And she had this habit of guessing about people when she’d just met them. ‘You came from a farm,’ she’d say, ‘and you had a pet cow named Nell, and you joined 4-H when you were ten years old, and the cow won a blue ribbon at the county fair.’ She did that all the time, and she was usually right. I can do it sometimes. So can Dorsey. It scared people, that she could make them laugh any time she wanted to and guess what their lives were like. She wasn’t psychic, just intuitive. It was sort of beyond a talent. It was like a gift. There was no real way to use it, except with my father. Back and forth. He was her straight man. He gave her lines.”

  “Daddy drove a Nash, but my mother drove a Mercury,” Dorsey says from the backseat. “Do you know why?”

  “No,” Simon shakes his head. “Why?”

  “Because,” Dorsey and Hugh say together, “it’s the only car with the name of a god.” Hugh smiles. “That’s what she always said.”

  “Oh.”

  “She saw how smart Dorsey was,” Hugh says, “for things, for the way they worked. She bought her a microscope and a telescope later, and all sorts of mechanical devices that Dorsey could take apart. Clocks and switches and valves. They were all over the place. My parents weren’t afraid that this was ungirlish.”

  “How do you know?” Dorsey interrupts.

  “I just do. They believed in you. They thought you were capable of great things.”

  This sentence brings the car to a whistling desert quiet. Hugh looks in the backseat and sees Dorsey, her face softened into the past, time parting in a wave in front of her. The trailer jerks and weaves behind them. To the side, Hugh sees the Denver and Rio Grande ebbing away into the distance, disappearing into a coupled link of traveling points.

  “They raised us, and then they left us alone by ourselves to manage any way we could,” Dorsey says. “The way parents do. They died, and there we were, out in the world. Hell, everyone’s an orphan sooner or later.”

  There is in her unsentimentality, her toughness, something that strikes Hugh as oversimplified, so he says, “It’s not that simple,” but he doesn’t construct an argument to go with it. He thinks: orphan.

  They have reached Utah, the edge of the Great Salt Desert, white flats ahead of them to the horizon.

  • • •

  At a rest stop just outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, one hundred thirty miles east of the Continental Divide and on this side of another bad night’s sleep, Hugh is sitting in the Pontiac, waiting for Simon and Dorsey to return from the public restrooms. The passenger door is open; a damp early June breeze, a springtime greenhouse smell, passes through the car, and Hugh inhales it, trying to make himself remember it. Noah sits in Hugh’s lap, pulling urgently at one of the buttons on his uncle’s shirt. To the west the sky blurs, loses its focus over the Rockies, whose inclines and fallen rocks and majesties they have just escaped. Hugh puts his index finger on the back of Noah’s neck and gives it a tickling rub. The boy closes his eyes in a happy squint. Pleased with his success, Hugh inserts his finger inside Noah’s shirt and tickles the boy again.

  “I’ve been robbed.”

  It’s Simon: standing, amused. His hands in his pockets, he rocks back and forth, watching Hugh, surveying the rest stop’s parking lot, the trucks on the interstate.

  “What?”

  “I was robbed.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  Hugh stands up, holding Noah, and stares at Simon. “Good God. How?”

  “I was pissing,” Simon tells him. “Into the urinal. And this gentleman wearing a fishing cap with a very low visor saunters along and snitches my wallet out of my back pocket. Zip zip, just like that. I had to admire his speed. And I couldn’t chase him, could I? After all, I was pissing. I can’t stop once I’ve started. Some can. I can’t. And there wasn’t anyone else in the bathroom to shout to. I’m sure he’s gone by now, spending all my money on trinkets in Cheyenne.”

  “Simon,” Hugh says, outraged, “that’s terrible. You’ve got to call the police.”

  “What?” Dorsey has appeared. Taking the baby in her arms, she is told the story, looks surprised, but does not appear to be frightened or demoralized. “Oh,” is all she says.

  “What about the money?” Hugh asks, catching Noah’s eye, and smiling.

  “I’ve got that.” Dorsey pats her purse. “All the traveler’s checks are right here. You can’t trust Simon with money. We don’t let him have more than forty dollars at a time.”

  “Well,” Hugh says, trying to maintain the heat of outrage, “what about your driver’s licence?”

  “I don’t have one,” Simon says.

  “What?”

  “I don’t have one,” Simon repeats. “Never have. I couldn’t pass the test.”

  “Goddamn it, Simon,” Hugh shouts, “you’ve been driving hour after hour, all of us, including this child, half the way from San Francisco, and you’re telling me you don’t have a fucking licence?”

  Simon’s voice is placid. “I’ve been driving fifteen years without a licence. Never needed it. Never been ticketed. I’m very careful. Some might even say I’m a meticulous driver. If you’re careful, you don’t need a licence.” He smiles, showing his brilliant teeth.

  “What about your credit cards?”

  Simon squinches his nose. “Don’t like them. Dorsey’s got a few, don’t you, darling?”

  “That’s right,” she says.

  Hugh looks at his brother-in-law, then the sky, then the ground. “Simon,” he asks, “just what do you keep in your wallet?”

  “A few dollars,” Simon smiles, putting his hand around his wife’s shoulders, “condoms, and pictures of your sister, this woman, my wife. Nine pictures of Dorsey, and five pictures of Dorsey and Noah. That’s about all. And what I say is, if a criminal wants to steal a wallet like that, let him. Let him feast his eyes. I think it’d do wonders for his criminal character to gaze on this woman’s face, don’t you? Let him fall in love at a distance, is what I say. He’s got the money; I’ve got her.”

  Holding Noah, Dorsey kisses Simon on the cheek, then turns to stare at her brother, her eyes full of pride: this is the man I married. He owns nothing a stranger can steal.

  They have a flat tire outside of Ogallala, Nebraska, and by the time Hugh has fixed it—Simon can’t figure out how to get the hubcap off—it’s late afternoon, and they decide to stay for the night. They take two rooms in the Royalty Inn, eat an early dinner, then retire. Hugh tries to watch television, a police show. He struggles to believe the story, to understand it, but cannot. The actors are acting, the commercials interrupt the drift of things, then the actors act some more, but it’s not a story about people: it’s a spectacle in which actors speak lines and shoot blanks from guns and other actors, in response, clutch their stomachs and pretend to fall dead, while the music swells before the credits come on.

  He glances around the room for something to read. There is a standing card on the bedside table that explains the existence of Ogallala, pop. 5,700, el. 3,216 ft. The town’s heyday was the decade between 1874 and 1884. It was a railroad town and cattle-shipping point. The Oregon Trail passed nearby. So much for Ogallala. Putting his fingers in the bedside drawer, he feels the imitation leather of the Gideon Bible and pulls it out. He opens it to the Book of Nahum. Who is Nahum? He’s never heard of Nahum.

  The chariots rage in the streets,

  they rush to and fro through the squares;

  they gleam like torches,

  they dart lik
e lightning.

  He reads until the violence of the events and the language disturbs him, and he puts the book back in the drawer. There is a bump against the wall, then another. After a third bump he hears a woman’s throaty laughter. He thinks of motels, their thin walls, and gets to his feet. He slips on his shoes, takes his room key, and goes outside.

  He walks until he’s out of town—ten minutes—and stands on a straight paved road that cuts through a field until it is absorbed by the horizon. It’s almost Five Oaks: it has the same forlorn unloveliness. The noise of the insects is louder here, like ratchets. Crickets and grasshoppers and other exoskeletal life—he remembers the illustrations in his high school biology book—live here under the blades of the long grass. He looks along a line of dead trees, their branches shaped as if with arthritis, toward a field whose soil has recently been turned up for spring planting. At the other, far end of the field, the downstairs lights of a farmhouse are shining, and he thinks of the family sitting around the table in the kitchen, the children and the parents eating their dinner rapidly, without thought. There would be a dog lying underneath the table, watching for spills. He remembers to call home as soon as he has walked back into O gallala. A car drives by on the road and the driver waves to Hugh as if he knows him, his whole left bare arm raised and in motion outside the car’s window. The red tail lights recede into the distance. Another light, much farther out, miles away on the horizon, blinks on.

  Hugh breathes in the weighted and dense odor of farmland, the rich heaviness of the soil, and thinks of his sister lying naked, covered by Simon, in the motel’s wide bed. He shuts his eyes and when he opens them again he sees the first star of the evening, which he knows must be Venus. The planet’s light, its bright point, is just above the light on the horizon. They match perfectly, vertically linked. Twin points of light, earth and air, Gemini. Hugh feels a pleasurable chill of dislocation, abandonment, a traveler’s feeling. Another car drives by, a Dodge, and its driver also waves at him, a generous wide-arcing wave. Why are they waving at me? he wonders. They must think I live here. As the car recedes, Hugh waves back. Hello, I don’t live here.

  As he walks back, he sees the motel, the Royalty Inn, its large VACANCY sign shining in orange letters over the plowed fields. Yes—much vacancy here. Several blocks from the motel he calls Laurie from a phone booth. Very soon after she answers she begins to tell him about a small cold Tina has caught somehow, the sore-throat, hacking kind. And there’s been a storm, she says, which has frightened Tina and awakened her, so that she coughed part of the night. Laurie’s mother has telephoned and will be visiting soon, but just for a few days. Last night, Laurie says, she had cooked up some chicken breasts for dinner. What recipe? Hugh asks, and waits without hope after her answer for Laurie to ask him a question, any kind of question, about his trip. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t like to ask him questions over the telephone; her mother had once told her that asking questions over the telephone was unmannerly and rude and bad form for a woman. Whatever Laurie hears, she waits to be told. So Hugh explains what he can, and when he says that his sister is now married, Laurie’s voice alters: it rises in interest. “I can’t believe that,” she says, sounding as if she believes it quite readily. “Dorsey is married? Who’s the guy?” And Hugh, standing in the phone booth in Ogallala, staring at the sign that says VACANCY over the fields of Nebraska, tells his wife, “I don’t know. His name is Simon O’Rourke. He’s an actor. I don’t know who he is.”

  In western Iowa, past Council Bluffs, Dorsey in front, Hugh driving, and Simon in back with Noah, they see a thunderhead to the east, the back of it, lit from within by paneled lightning, and underneath it, rain falling in a solid mass. Hugh turns on the headlights—the air is a pastel green—and they drive over a hill and into the teeming water. Hugh grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turn white; ahead of him, cars are vanishing into separate waterfalls. “Well, folks,” Simon says loudly in a New England accent, “there’re some people lost on the freeway, and a few cars sideswiped and demolished, but up there in the skies the stars are moving in those old-fashioned zodiacs, and I guess there’s not much we can do about it one way or the other. There’s been some travelers who’ve spun off the pavement into the ditch, and one old lady in a brown Chrysler havin’ chest pains, but that’s the way it goes out here. It’s a hard life on the interstate, but folks’ve been drivin’ it now for decades—families, bachelors, single girls lookin’ for a husband—sort of like a river of—”

  “—Please shut up, would you?” Hugh asks.

  “Simon,” Dorsey says. “Not now. Please. No Our Town on this trip.”

  “Yup,” Simon says, as if he hasn’t heard them, “cars pitchin’ forward, and cars lost, and cars goin’ to Illinois and not meanin’ to and never comin’ back, but it’s all out of our hands. Pretty soon it’ll be nightfall and folks’ll be checkin’ into motels, married folks, and folks that’ll never be married no matter what kind of plastic surgery they get, and they’ll be sleepin’ soon, and the old stars’ll just keep turnin’, rain or no rain.”

  “A character,” Hugh says, his teeth clenched. “No more characters, Simon.”

  “It’s what I do,” Simon says from the back, his voice altering to an explanatory monotone.

  “I’m sorry,” Hugh says. “I am so sorry about this.” He is creeping at twenty miles an hour. The trailer is pulled and jerked in the tailwinds. “I can’t believe this guy,” Hugh says, in his calmest rage.

  “Hugh,” Dorsey says, touching his knee.

  “Simon, are you gay?” Hugh asks, his voice thick.

  “Define your terms.”

  “Because you certainly sound like it to me.”

  “Has it come to this?” Simon’s voice has altered and sounds like a network sports announcer. “Accusations?” And then Hugh hears a perfect imitation of his own voice coming from the back seat. He hears, in his own voice, Simon’s voice saying, “I th-th-thought you wanted to hear about the stars. And if I were … what you called me, I wouldn’t ever tell you.”

  “Dorsey,” Hugh says, as the rain starts to let up. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. It’s been—”

  “He’s my husband,” Dorsey says. “And you don’t know him.” She looks at her brother. “He can be anyone he wants to be. Isn’t that amazing? That’s his gift. He can be you. Or anyone he wants to be. Leave him alone.”

  “I thought he wanted to hear about the stars,” Simon says, his voice sounding like Hugh’s. “I guess he didn’t want to hear.”

  In Illinois, Dorsey wakes up and looks at the cornfields. “You know why I became a physicist?” she asks. She rubs her eyes and reaches into her purse for a pair of dark glasses. “I became a physicist so that I’d be free of this.” Hugh looks out across a field and sees an old broken windmill and a grain elevator far in the distance. Free? Free of what? He’s afraid to ask. Then Dorsey says, “I thought it would take me away from the earth, and for a while, it did.”

  At the James Whitcomb Riley rest stop in Indiana just past South Bend, Dorsey is changing Noah’s diapers—she and Simon have been trading off this task—while Simon does wind sprints in a grassy area signposted as a dog walk south of the parking lot. Hugh is checking the Pontiac’s engine; though it’s taken three quarts of oil, it hasn’t overheated or broken down, and he can’t understand why. Cars like this, pulling trailers, are supposed to experience systems-failure on cross-country trips. But everything, the fluid levels and the spark plugs and the belts and the hoses, everything is in order.

  He slams down the hood of the car and turns to see his brother-in-law running back and forth in sprints of less than a hundred yards each. Each one of these sprints begins with Simon lowering himself into a crouch, right foot behind the left, fingertips down on the grass, before he snaps forward. He is barefoot, and his T-shirt is soaked through in a funnel pattern with sweat. It makes Hugh remember how, years ago, before hockey practice would begin on the ice, he and his teammates wou
ld sprint back and forth in the Five Oaks gym to get their wind strong after a summer of smoking and parties. He remembers big guys heaving and passing out, nausea-white, underneath the water fountains.

  He walks toward Simon. He smiles. On his right is a family eating cold chicken for lunch at a picnic table. “Simon,” he says, “cool it out. We’re going to have to sit with you in the car for the next hour and you’re going to stink. You’ll be rank.”

  Simon doesn’t look at him. He watches the ground. He puts his feet into position and begins to lower himself to a crouch. “I don’t smell,” he says. He is breathing quickly, regularly. “My sweat does not smell. You won’t smell me. No one ever has.”

  “But everyone sm—” Hugh says before Simon takes off. He waits until Simon runs back, past him. “Everyone smells when they sweat. You take me. When I—”

  “No,” Simon says. “I sweat pure salt water.”

  Hugh is standing just above Simon and to the side. Against his better judgment, he sniffs the air. It smells like air.

  “Wanna race?” Simon asks, turning his head and looking up at Hugh. “Wanna race to that trash receptacle down there?”

  Hugh laughs. “You look like you did some running in high school or something.” He waits. “I don’t know.”

  “You played hockey,” Simon says, staring at the ground. “Your sister told me. She said you were real good.”

  “I’ve lost my speed.” Hugh looks quickly toward the car, trying to see Dorsey motioning him back. But she is leaning against a poplar with Noah, in the shade, her hands moving in front of her child.

  “Yeah,” Simon says, “and I’ve been running for the last ten minutes. Come on, man. Where’s your pride? You can beat me. You can whip my pansy ass. Think of the pleasure in that.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sort of old for this.” All four members of the family eating chicken are watching him.